Unmourned Funeral: Chapter 10

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Chapter 1 begins here

CHAPTER 10
THE RETURN OF THE QUEEN

A Quiet Homecoming

O what can it mean
To a daydream believer
Or a homecoming queen?
The Monkees, Daydream Believer

Can the Queen return to what was once her kingdom? Any return, any cultural reconquista by philosophy would require philosophers who are not jobbing TV sophists with agents, half-journalist and half-pop psychologist, but those who have gone back to the source texts, put in the man-hours, those who have read the important Western, white philosophy books and not merely heard or read about them in a snack-size YouTube tutorial or a Sunday newspaper feature. Those who are lovers of wisdom, the “new species of philosopher” foretold by Nietzsche. We must hope that such a generation is still possible if philosophy is to return to the city she fled when she faked her own death. If Philosophy were to return home, then where would she be returning to? Let’s give the place where we live a local habitation and a name. We live in Traumaville.

This town is coming like a ghost town.
The Specials, Ghost Town

Shortly before film director Stanley Kubrick died, he was at work on his final film when he gave an interview to film and television journalists. One television listings magazine ran Kubrick’s comments, including his explanation of the source for his last work, Eyes Wide Shut. The film, Kubrick explained, was inspired by a German novel written in 1926 by an Austrian, Arthur Schnitzler, and titled Traumaville.

Schnitzler’s book is usually rendered into English as “Dream Story”, and this is the accepted translation of the German Traumnovelle, which is what Kubrick had actually said but which had been misheard either live or via a recording as “Traumaville”. It was perfect; a very modern mistake and a place, a location, is born.

Traumaville is where we all live now. A cross between Plato’s Republic and Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, a combination of Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, and Zemyatin’s We. A strange mix of the real and the unreal, Traumaville feels increasingly like home, if not as secure. The town motto is a simple one; Be not too afraid.

In Traumaville, an elite political class wields power by a combination of deception and selective truth-telling. A powerful media class maintains a Potemkin village of culture and social cohesion while undermining whites. Russian dissident Yuri Bezmenov and Samuel T. Francis have already written Traumaville’s Constitution. The inhabitants of Traumaville are fed just enough distraction, panem et circenses 2.0, to keep them away from the sanctum sanctorum of the ruling classes but, like little Toto uncovering the Wizard of Oz operating switches and levers at the back of his machinery, those inhabitants are slowly beginning to understand both that Traumaville is not what it seems, and that it is about to change into somewhere considerably more dangerous. The political class and its media courtiers will continue to deny, like the wizard, that there is anything of significance to see. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” is what the titular Wizard of Oz says in the film. But there is something to see, and the simple folk of Traumaville are beginning, in their twos and threes – Burke’s “little platoons”, perhaps, in virtual form – to become more inquisitive. Traumaville is still, however, a troubled town, whether the Queen returns or not.

It has come to this, that the very possibility of a real philosophy of today and tomorrow is in question.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

So, what of the return of the Queen to Traumaville, not now the same kingdom she stole away from? Will philosophy burst back onto the academic scene, refreshed and revivifying the Humanities, inspiring a new generation of thinkers to look for the truth and despise folly? Will there be a philosophically led Renaissance 2.0? Unlikely. The current cultural atmosphere is beyond toxic, and supports intellectual life only in its most rudimentary forms. What if Haeckel was right, and the life of mankind really does move in parallel with the life of a human being, and ontogeny equals phylogeny? If that is the case, we recall a line from Mike Leigh’s 1993 film Naked:

Have you ever thought, right, but you don’t know, but you may have already lived the happiest day in your whole fucking life and all you have left to look forward to is fucking sickness and purgatory?

Perhaps we have already passed peak humanity, and all that is left is senility and death. Philosophy may have ministered to many of its great proponents and practitioners, but it can’t save this patient.

So no, we won’t see happy rows of schoolchildren delighted to be puzzling over Plato and Descartes, or basking in the placid wisdom of Seneca or Marcus. Of what worth is the study of philosophy to the future of a nation, after all? The French famously have a strong element of the study of philosophy in the much-lauded baccalaureate, and look where France is. The most Islamised country in Europe is not exactly conducive to a boost in speculative philosophy, as we have seen. So, what was France’s institutional tradition of philosophising eventually worth? As the character Anton Chigurh in Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men observes to a man he is about to kill: “If the rule you followed led you to this, of what use was the rule?”

No, forget the modern world if you wish to be a philosopher. It is not going to help you. As noted, philosophy has primarily been disqualified by virtue of its whiteness, the very aspect which makes it so compelling. (Why read the philosophy of those who failed to thrive historically, whose social evolution, or lack of it, is reflected in the paucity of their intellectual achievements?) In the age of unreason, you will receive no plaudits for studying this most ancient and once-venerated of disciplines. In an age where we hear the tribal drums beating out the false mantra of slavery and its spurious history, white folk are all slaves now, and to study philosophy is to invite ridicule and worse. Epictetus, himself a slave but better known in his later incarnation as a Stoic, warns us of this with reference to philosophy: “If you desire philosophy, prepare yourself from the beginning to be ridiculed, to expect that many will sneer at you…”

But philosophy now is, more perhaps than it already was, a potential antidote for the individual who has answered its call. Among the cultural detritus, philosophy is still a panacea against the West and its toxic culture. Do you want to immerse yourself in the world of the Oscars, Netflix, video games, woke universities, synthetic and charmless music, generic fashion, social media, airport magazines which all have black people on the front even though white people mostly read them, CNN, the BBC? Go ahead. It’s your dime.

Or would you rather push yourself further? The clarity of thought of the Cartesian Discourse and Meditations, the crystalline beauty of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the melancholy, Gothic feel of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, the mellow conversation of Plato’s speakers; none of this reeks of the modern. Modern culture has been part of the overall casual social engineering that has been tinkering subtly but malevolently with the West since the 1960s. And the lathe has beaten back the fern. Culture and its machineries are now largely vulgar, vapid and vainglorious. Culture constantly applauds itself and gives galas in its own name. It holds the little people, we cap-in-hand peons, in contemptuous thrall, celebrities casting a fierce glamour over those untermensch who have never had much time for reading and thinking because they have never tried, have indeed been heavily dissuaded from trying, distracted by glitter and bauble. So, no, philosophy is not coming back to save them, and she is not coming back to save you or your children.

Philosophy is not interested in saving anyone but herself. This ruthless coquettishness is what delights about her, as Albertine delighted Swann, Proust’s lover who spends so much time alone, or says she does. Solitary contemplation is something we associate more with the Medieval mind than the modern, particularly as technology diminishes our ability to be truly alone, but the philosopher once away from the Platonic agora was also a solitary figure. Philosophy is mostly a solitary activity; it is often necessary to remove oneself from the world in order to think that world through.

Although solitariness is generally taken to mean the absence of other people, Plato reminds us that the great writers we read are our friends, companions, and teachers. Seneca entreats Lucilius: “You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.”

If you wish for redemption via philosophy, the way is open. Metaphysician, heal thyself.

A metaphysician is a man who goes into a dark cellar at midnight without a light looking for a black cat which is not there.
Variation on an unattributed saying

Philosophers of the Western tradition have given us so many versions of the world, shown us how to think through it, how to separate truth from untruth, how to debate and discuss and dissect. This is why they are no longer welcome in a world of knaves and fools, albeit powerful knaves and fools. But, like lingering guests at a ball, they have not yet left. Physics is all the rage this season. Metaphysics has to stand outside in the cold.

Imagine a bare room in a museum. In the centre of the floor is a large, Greek amphora, one of the classical urns used to hold grain or water. A man enters and observes the object. He is a Platonist, and sees not only a large stoneware jar but also the earthly, temporal copy of an ideal jar, which is both represented by this second-order amphora and at the same time makes its existence possible. The man leaves the room and is replaced by another.

The English poet Coleridge wrote that a man is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelean, and a representation of the latter class replaces the former in the room. The Aristotelean sees an object formed by the confluence of the fourfold principle of sufficient reason (on which Schopenhauer based his doctoral thesis): Material cause, efficient cause, form, and final purpose. He has seen enough, and is replaced by a Kantian.

The Kantian sees a jar which exists only by virtue of time and space, two transcendental matrices which allow experience to take place in a type of epistemological symbiosis. But although our Kantian gentleman sees the jar, he sees only the phenomenon. He can never see the noumenon. He gives up trying and leaves, telling a Lockean empiricist in passing that there is no point entering the room as he would see only the Lockean secondary quality and never the primary quality, and a Schopenhauerian pushes rudely past them both.

The Schopenhauerian is already in a foul mood simply knowing that a Kantian has bothered to inspect the attractive jar, so redolent of the past. What was the point? He only posits a secondary and accessible world, a “secondary jar” which is open to experience, and another jar, not accessible in the same sensory way, but nevertheless guaranteeing that experience. There is no such world. The jar exists as an idea and there is no metaphysical spectre lurking behind the phenomenal. He stomps out to be replaced by a Nietzschean.

This observer sees a distillation of the Will to Power, the eternal return of the same. But he also sees the jar as a portal back to his beloved classical age, a message from the Greeks. Also, Nietzsche being probably the best-qualified philologist in the Western philosophical canon, his acolyte might know that this amphora, this jar, was of the sort from which Pandora unleashed her evils, “Pandora’s Box” being a mistranslation.

A Freudian and a Jungian visit together, at least superficially happy in one another’s company. The Freudian sees a womblike symbol, the Jungian an atavistic connection with mythical symbolism. This is philosophy as partly truth, partly fiction.

When the philosophers have come and gone, and the night watchman is checking the galleries before locking up for the night he looks into the room. He sees the jar and closes the door. Then a strange thought occurs to him. How does he know the jar is still in the room, even though he has just seen it? He believes it is in there, but he can’t know that it is. He comes to himself and dismisses the ridiculous question. Perhaps working nights is starting to get to him, make him a little cranky. He’s been reading quite a bit too, there alone in the museum at night. Maybe reading all the time is a bit of a strange way to behave. He resolves to watch more TV in the office, to keep his mind alive.

So many books, so little time.
Frank Zappa

You don’t study philosophy anywhere but in books. Yes, you can apply what you have learned – which amounts to the ways in which you have been led to modify yourself internally – in life, in your everyday experiences and the social transactions you make. But read and you will see the truth of the alchemical saying that “One book opens another”. Philosophy does not exist solely in books which call themselves philosophy books, it is spread wide. But the ritual and discipline of the book is central to philosophy’s quest. (This is something Islam understands, albeit with a library of one book, or three if you include the Hadith and The Reliance of the Traveller).

If you took a minuscule fraction of the cost of a degree and went to every charity shop or thrift store you could find that sells books, and bought books that looked interesting until you had spent your budget, you will have launched an academic career in the Humanities which will be far more fruitful than anything a modern university could supply. Modern teachers are worthless, timid and afraid. Classical and archaic teachers, long dead but very much alive in the books they have left us, the homework they have set us, are the opposite and are available at the turn of a page. As noted, if you are young, this will enhance your prospects of future employment as employers come to realise that someone steeped in the classics is of more use in the office than a grievance-machine with a degree in Gender Studies.

In addition to this, you will avoid the undoubted harm to your mental health that three years at a modern university would cause. Living in an atmosphere of suspicion and censure, a microcosmic version of the Soviet Union – I have known people who lived under Soviet rule – is not conducive to a healthy, inquiring and temperate personality. Modern universities across the West are incubating a generation of people who are going to be very hard to get along with once they graduate. I see a schism in the not-too-distant future between the post-modernes and their carnival of neo-Puritanical neuroses, and conservatives, for want of a better word, who recognize that the West has changed for the worse and are fully aware of who is to blame. Secession is inevitable, segregation something much to be wished for.

When philosophy returned to the forefront of the Western world during the Renaissance she did so in defiance of the Church, and perhaps opposition is required to rebirth philosophy this time around. Religion is also a double-edged sword. It provides succour for the genuinely downtrodden, but it also provides a power structure available for the social and financial betterment of the malevolent class that has existed in every age.

We have viewed evidence of a parallel structure and belief system linking the Medieval Roman Catholic Church and the modern Church of Woke, and so we have our opposition. In the classical corpus, we have all the wisdom needed to frighten the ideological new model army, petrified as they are and will remain that rough white men might take to the classics, might come to worship them, live them out in thought and deed.

Whereas the Skeptic philosophy arose within Hellenism as the negation of philosophy – declaring philosophy to be purposeless – we, on the contrary, regard the history of philosophy as, in the last resort, philosophy’s gravest theme.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

We have seen that philosophy is a coalmine canary, first out of the trenches to be mown down in the culture war. At first glance, its radical whiteness seems justification enough for its censure by the new commissars, given the prevailing cultural winds. But there is also a fear of the book, particularly those written by philosophers too far back in antiquity to be on the hook for connections with slavery, such as Kant and Hume are deemed to be. The Left will allow some books, of course, pre-approved, ethnically cleansed, state-underwritten, ideologically pre-fabricated dogma. This literature will give the illusion of informing while in fact indoctrinating.

In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the dissident protagonist Montag gets an insight into how to control the masses from his boss, Beatty:

If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides of a question to worry him; give him one… Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them all so damned full of “facts” they feel stuffed, but absolutely “brilliant” with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

There is so much simulation in today’s world, so much of the simulacrum, why not have a simulated education? Everyone who wishes to subvert and control the West, or to be subverted and controlled, wins. The students feel “brilliant with information”, the universities guarantee their revenue streams flow uninterrupted by conforming to state mandate, and the state itself gets ever more docile, intellectually negligible, manipulable drones. As noted, taking on philosophy means application, study, setting aside time to think and analyse and doubt, taking up a new relationship with yourself at the same time as you are beginning a new relationship with philosophy. It is axiomatic that new affairs can be a fraught business, and a clarity of thought is both armour and weapon. Philosophy will help you expand your parameters, not constrain you in some neo-Puritan strait-jacket. This is why it is totally unsuited to the Leftist mindset, opposed as it is to intellectual endeavour and preferring placardism, policy by slogan. The Left has a philosophy in the same way a thief has a moral code.

Would that classics were restored to the syllabus, even if it upsets Mark Zuckerberg’s kid sister. It might bode better for at least the defence of the West. Chinese and Russian troops are prescribed nationalistic, patriotic and militaristic literature, while the US military have been recommending a book be read by the troops entitled How to be an Anti-Racist, by the pseudonymous Ibram X. Kendi. It is interesting to note the reading matter of the Prussian military complex in the first century of that state’s existence. Julius Evola, in Notes on the Third Reich, informs us that:

[I]n the Corpus Militaris introduced into the [Prussian] academies of the eighteenth century, the official was urged to study the works of Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero and Epictetus. Marcus Aurelius, especially, was the preferred reading of Frederick the Great.

The aspects of classical philosophy that so appall Ms. Zuckerberg and lead to her call for an intellectual boycott by (doubtless having learned the art of censorship from her brother) are its whiteness and its valuation of truth, wisdom’s sponsor.

The philosopher alone is not subject to judgment, for he has never lost the vision of truth.
Plato, Phaedrus

Whiteness is the main charge against philosophy. Samuel Francis, in an essay entitled The Return of the Repressed, sees white identity as the ultimate modern taboo:

White racial consciousness, the shared awareness of whites that their racial identity and heritage are real and important and worth preserving, is by far the most taboo of all beliefs about race, a taboo that is not enforced consistently or at all against the consciousness of other races.

No wonder philosophy was shot point-blank. There are not many “whiter” disciplines. The war on philosophy is a battle in a wider war against white culture, which did not produce hierarchies by force, but simply recorded what they found ready-made in nature. White civilisation’s reward for translating Newton’s “Great book of the world” into philosophical speculation is to be banned from the library. From a Western perspective, as well as being a discipline and a road less travelled, philosophy is also a racial bond, an ethnic commonality which can only serve to unite its students. To think philosophically is to think whiteness, is a broadly Caucasian pursuit. More, philosophy ought to be the glue which binds together the political Right.

The white mainstream Right does not have a philosophically informed ideology, and it often resembles a careerist and sectarian squabble for control rather than a ratiocinative program. If there were a curriculum for the resistance – and there ought to be – then philosophy should be the main feature. To be able to think through problems, and to be aware of why you have thought them through in just that way – and that does involve cultural relativism, which is not a completely busted flush – is a great advantage when facing an enemy who are riding a wave of suspended disbelief. Reality will come crashing down on the Left, as it has on all Socialists, and when it does there had better be an advance guard to take back the territory and ask the right questions because otherwise the tsunami will carry us all away.

Asking the right questions. This received wisdom which instructs in the art of asking correctly, of framing enquiries and seeking relevance. Questioning comes before answering, which returns us to the ruinous epistemological turn the modern SJW class is making on behalf of all of us and the generations to follow. Learning to question the world, both inner and outer (for we may as well behave as though dualism exists, since it seems to be our only practical working option), does not mean beginning with your outcome and working back from it, introducing terms in reverse, confounding post-Enlightenment methodology. It means thinking through.

Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of philosophy?… [Philosophy] will clip an angel’s wings… conquer all mysteries by rule and line… unweave a rainbow.
Jonathan Keats, Lamia

We have been, for some time, in an era of the body. We don’t have as much time to quibble about the old philosophical problems as we used to, we have to play the hand we have been dealt, but dualism is a default position when placed in its historical and philosophical context, and although what has become known as the “mind/body problem” is a staple area of dispute throughout philosophy’s history, we can act as though there were both a body and a separable element which is “not-body” and make sense of the world. This dualistic pairing, however, has not been treated equally outside of the theoretical parameters of metaphysics. As far as the modern West is concerned, we are body, and mind is just the programmable part. With no afterlife as its potential testing ground, why perfect that part of us which is not body? Why not perfect the body part – or at least indulge it – while we are here and before the darkness comes? Alan Bloom shows the differing attitudes among students in the late 1980s:

As it now stands, students have a perfect image of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one.

While the body is in gymnasium or clothing store, or eating sensibly somewhere, the mind is fed a high-fact diet with no philosophy. There is so much white noise in the modern media, so much static, that you can’t hear a tune, like a faulty radio, or one which needs new batteries. This is very much the environment which we now inhabit, part engineered, part accepted by the very lab rats themselves, us.

Is philosophy the equivalent of the instruction manual we threw away unread? Now that the labour-saving device we purchased has gone wrong, are we sifting through the trash-can looking for the vital booklet we so foolishly discarded? Civilizations seem to prosper when philosophy is in the ascendant, or perhaps it simply appears that way as prosperous civilizations have the means to indulge and essentially pay their philosophers. Now, to earn a living from philosophy generally means teaching and teaching means conforming to an academic regime geared specifically against the type of intellectual practices favoured by white philosophy. This is unavoidably entropic, and it is also why philosophy, philosophy itself, is being forced underground, into the shadows, into the forest to snipe at the town like maquis sharp-shooters.

Whatever type of remedy philosophy might assist in (its purpose is not revolutionary), it must be read and read again. And it is not hard to source. That philosophy can be easily accessed online is an unintended consequence of the internet. The elites would far rather you used this Gutenbergian revolution for shopping and pornography, occasionally taking a break to read some tractor production figures on a government website, or listen to the EU’s latest ode to joy. But philosophy – which I have called “liberatory discourse” – is there too, hyper-available, much of it free, the core texts for an autodidact’s degree.

For the internet is our Gutenberg. Without it, we would be at the level of handing out flyers and meeting at someone’s house, waiting for a phone call. A virtual community of dissident philosophers is only possible online, and the guardians know that. If philosophy sides, as it must and almost always has, with the camp of the dissidents, then it will become as proscribed as the hoariest of hate-speech. This may be essential for its survival in a form that has integrity and freedom of thought, as well as tradition.

Is the internet a second Renaissance? The fact that the globalists have managed to fashion an anarcho-tyrannical Denaissance from it suggests limitations. But it is possible now, with just an e-book reader, to assemble a library of classical texts which the Medicis would not have been able to access, and that for free. At the time of writing, Amazon has not yet banned any first-order philosophy texts. In a way, I wish it would.

It would be a great mistake for philosophy to fall into the trap of modernisation, whereby any cultural production is valid simply by virtue of its novelty, a novelty which contains a paradox. For our post-modern friends, the world has to do two contradictory things (in perfect congruence with their overall tendency to cognitive dissonance). The world must hurtle forward ceaselessly, with ever more consumer goods and entertainment, and it must also stay absolutely still, its values – new and upstart as those values may be – utterly immutable and inflexible.

Immutable and inflexible laws are hard to find, but we must begin by looking, and not among the gleaming shop-displays of the (post-) modern, but by rummaging in the dusty attic of the past. The greatest philosophy has already been written and the point of it is to read it, not to try fruitlessly to improve on it.

The highest to which man can attain is wonder.
Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

In the end, there is something of the vampire about the Lady Philosophy. You have to invite her in, but once there she will never leave. Instead, Philosophy may creep back under cover of night, look for her old room, her old garret, wondering if it is just as she left it…

Philosophy, writes Plato, begins in wonder. Freud and Descartes will echo him, even Bertrand Russell, but the English word “wonder” is ideally placed here. We “wonder” what something is, just as Thales, Anaximander and Democritus would have done. Great thinkers approach the world, the earth, in reverence, a genuflection which could not be further from today’s environmental poseurs. There were great philosophers, great white thinkers who started with the world and thought through it, each in their way. What great philosopher can we envisage emerging from the dry straw of contemporary thought? The philosophical will is absent. There is no longer anything at which to gaze in wonder. Except philosophy itself, herself.

We philosophers, as Nietzsche terms this great family of lovers of wisdom, may be called upon to save philosophy herself from death itself. Like Orpheus, then, we may have to descend into Hades itself in order to save our Eurydice (dead from the serpent’s bite after her escape from the sexual advances of Aristaeus). If we heed Hades’ single condition for the successful rescue, that Orpheus not look back at Eurydice until the pair reach the sunlight (the sunlight outside Plato’s cave, perhaps), then perhaps we should look not backwards but forward, to the return of the queen, to the homecoming of philosophy.

FIN